The head of the Center for the Digital Future shared his insights with iMedia Summit attendees.

In July 2004, Jeffrey Cole joined the USC Annenberg School for Communication as Director of the newly formed Center for the Digital Future and as a Research Professor. Prior to joining USC, Cole was a long-time member of the UCLA faculty and served as Director of the UCLA Center for Communication Policy, based in the Anderson Graduate School of Management. At UCLA and now at USC Annenberg, Cole founded the World Internet Project, a long-term longitudinal look at the effects of computer and Internet technology on all aspects of society, which is conducted in over 20 countries. At the announcement of the project in June 1999, Vice President Al Gore praised Cole as a "true visionary providing the public with information on how to understand the impact of media."

In an Insight Presentation to the iMedia Summit last month title, "New Internet Trends: Changing Media Use, Declining Credibility and the Rise of Broadband," Cole enlightened the audience with results from 10 years' worth of research. In the first piece of this series, Cole explained the impact of broadband. Here, he talks about media usage:

Moving into media use -- we found media use, especially television, has shown profound change. First what we find is television displacements continuing but changing. The use of newspapers and magazines has dropped for the second year in a row out of the four years we’ve been looking at this. The use of books declined slightly this year for the first time -- this is among Internet users. The use of radio and watching movies at home has remained stable. Internet doesn’t seem to be a factor here. And age makes an immense difference in how people use media.

And first just a television displacement chart -- if you can’t see this, that's okay. I’ll read it to you. This shows Internet users in blue and Internet non-users in yellow. And what you can see, is if you look at all these different countries we’re looking at, and every country in the world we are looking at, Internet users in blue watch less television than non-users in yellow. This isn’t all that surprising. If you take the United States, television has always dominated our at-home, awake time. And if we are going to carve out time to go online, it almost has to come from television. Although broadband, as I talked about in some length, is already beginning to change that a little bit. 

But everywhere we look we see displacement. Five years ago, I used to work in the 1990s with all four of the television networks on policy issues. When the networks first looked at this they said it’s demographic differences: Internet users are different. And that might have been true five years ago, but today Internet users in America are three-quarters of Americans who access the Internet at least once a month. They are by-in-large the whole country. They’re just a tiny bit younger than non-users. And that doesn’t account for this any more. Internet users actually do watch less conventional television.

Looking through America -- and I’ll walk through this quickly -- comparing Internet users in blue and non-users in yellow, we see Internet users spend a little bit less, almost an hour less, time per week reading books. They spend about almost over twice as much time watching movies in the theater. Internet users spend close to an hour per week watching movies in the theater, or close to 50 hours per year, or about two movies a month. Internet users spend more time watching rented movies at home, not significantly more, but more time. They spend over two and a half times as much time playing video games at home. This incidentally, is all Internet users. When we look at those under 18, this becomes about five hours. Internet users spend more time listening to recorded music, such as MP3s or CDs.

They spend 1.9 hours less time, per week, reading newspapers. You know that newspaper readership has been in trouble long before the Internet. It’s very difficult to get people under the age of 30 to read newspapers. If those trends continue, then you could argue in 40 years every newspaper reader in America will be dead. Hopefully that will not happen and younger people will take up newspaper reading in greater numbers as they age. But Internet users spend 1.9 hours less time per week reading newspapers. They do spend 42 minutes a week reading online newspapers. I don’t know if you consider them equivalent. And of those 42 minutes they spend per week reading online newspapers, about half of that is reading the newspaper they used to buy offline, the one they used to buy the hard copy of. The other half is reading a newspaper they never could have found on their own, from their home town, whether it’s in Indiana or India.

Internet users spend less time, but the drop is not as significant, reading magazines. They spend a tiny bit less time, not significantly, listening to the radio. And television we’ve already talked about.

And one thing -- I don’t have to go through this with people who work in advertising, but it’s really quite dramatic how media use in America varies by age. There are the media that increase as people age, that people use more of as they age. And there are the media they use less of as they age. The media use that increases as we age are reading books, reading newspapers, reading magazines, using the radio, except for one dip there, and watching television. 

The media use that decreases as people age are watching movies in the theater, watching rented movies at home, playing video or computer games, or listening to recorded music. You can see these are all consistent. The Internet’s an anomaly. The Internet use is fairly high among the young, reaches its highest levels among the middle aged who use it at work and at home, and then declines in use as people age. It’s the one anomaly when you compare it to all these other media.

And, if you look at online media, online media making a real impact, online newspaper readership is rising; the use of magazines and radio online is climbing; the use of online books, online telephone and television is still very low, although we expect to see the telephone break out when we go into the field next month. Online game use [had been] very high but dropped. It had grown for three straight years, dropped a little bit in Year Four. Maybe that’s an anomaly; maybe it’s a beginning of a trend.

I won’t walk you through all these numbers, except to say if you can see these numbers, where the offline numbers were hours, these are minutes. And you can see some online media use, very high: playing video or computer games, around an hour per week; the use of recorded music, getting close; reading newspapers, climbing fairly significantly; the use of reading books online, still insignificant. It’s not much fun to read a book online. I love the idea of going on vacation and loading 30 books into my PC. I just don’t like reading them on my PC. Maybe that will change. 

One of the things we found in our work is people over the age of 30 don’t like reading things online. If we get emails longer than two or three screenfuls, what do we do? We print them out. We’re use to touching and moving and holding. Teenagers are comfortable reading 20, 30 screenfuls online without printing out. Maybe that will change for them.

And just, if you look at age use in online media, you can see that if you look at those under 18, just look at these towers, the youngest people dominate all online media use, with the exception of newspapers and magazine, which are dominated or at the largest percentage by middle age. The exception of that, listening to recorded music, playing video computer games, watching movies, even reading books -- dominated by the youngest people.

Monday: The world's perceptions on the Internet's credibility and reliability.